1. Field of the Invention
The present general inventive concept relates to a management server, an image forming apparatus, a method of installing an Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi)-based service, and a computer-readable recording medium, and more particularly, to a management server capable of providing new services using functions provided by bundles which are pre-installed in an OSGi framework, an image forming apparatus, and a method of installing OSGi-based services, and a computer-readable recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
As digital technologies and Internet services have been distributed rapidly, a digital home technology which provides services that can help users in their everyday lives using all those digital technologies and Internet services has been established. The digital home technology aims to go beyond the concept of the home networking service which has been developed previously for sharing super-speed Internet sharing, file sharing and sharing of peripheral apparatuses, in order to provide more various functions utilizing well-established external communication infrastructure.
The representative service platform of such a digital home technology is an Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi) service platform which is designed to operate based on JAVA virtual machine. OSGi provides basic services on a framework, such as HTTP, service management, log service, etc., and service provides may provide services by distributing their services to the OSGi framework in the form of bundle. In particular, OSGi supports the existing home network technologies such as UPnP, Jini, HAVi, etc., and thus, may be applicable to various environments such as a television set-top box, a cable modem, an alarm system, an energy management system, and so on.
The bundle used in OSGi may be used by exporting or importing them from each other. Accordingly, extension, re-usability, and re-combination among bundles have been possible based on such flexibility of the bundles.
Conventionally, interlocking of bundles has been possible only by re-using interface between bundles through extension and linkage of functions, and it has not been possible for users to set, connect, store, or modify the existing functions directly from the perspective of the users, in order to be provided with new services.